


Five Spies, Five Senses

by Paratti



Category: Spooks | MI-5
Genre: F/M, Gen, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-02-05
Updated: 2012-02-05
Packaged: 2017-10-30 16:28:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,404
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/333731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Paratti/pseuds/Paratti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>I'd say I don't know where this comes from, but I'd be lying and not watching the news obsessively.<br/>Spoilers: S3 of Spooks. Set 2005.<br/>Rating: As the show.<br/>Warning: The lines are very blurred with RL events so it might very well disturb. It did me. Not beta'd. Angst. Somewhat bleak.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Spies, Five Senses

Harry knows he needs to sleep. He can see that his eyes are as red and strained as Ruth's are from reading memo after memo, pouring through file after file, talking to scum after scum who make his nightmares of Northern Ireland look like a teddy bear's picnic. He needs to sleep. He needs to rest, recharge, clear his mind; he needs to stop.

But he can't.

There's COBRA meeting after COBRA meeting, answers to give when he doesn't have answers, fires to put out when they've a dirty bomb to stop, chemicals they can't find and the gnawing fear of canister after canister of biological weapons missing in the breakdown of the Soviet Union. And it's all down to him and his to stop.

When half the team he'd depend on to do it are missing.

He tries hard not to see where they should be when he looks at the Grid. He doesn't look for Tom when he looks at the VX files. He uses Zaf to infiltrate the mosques and fights off Oliver Mace's strategic strikes at COBRA over the loss of the very asset they need in the first suicide bombing - the one that could be D-Noticed. He grinds his jaw as Ruth analyses websites linked to the scum that killed Danny, even as he makes her do it. He can't afford to think how he'd trained Tom to take over all this if anything happens to him, how Zoe wouldn't stop backing him up, and how he's had to beach her.

Harry has to make do with the tools he has.

He has to send Fiona to infiltrate cells far too close to Syria, to those that would light the match. He has to watch Adam play Bad Cop and bite down the nagging voice that he's far too good at it and bite down the urge to do it himself. He's the one in the suit, the one that has to look the PM in the eyes and have his eyes not betray him.

But the things he's seen, the things he's done, the things he's had to do and will do - there are times that he hates that they don't.

***

 

Ruth hears the whine of the sirens, the drone of circling helicopters in every e-mail that screams for her attention now, right now. She spends so long tied to her computer that the whirr of the fans spin into the horrific silence of losing Danny. Her mobile phone wasn't switched off when London's were and now it won't stop ringing until she hears it in her sleep.

When she can sleep.

With the screams she hears in the screech of the tube home, the barely suppressed fear in the voice of the woman on the number nineteen bus and the 'get the bastards' conversations of the people queuing at the sandwich shop, it's never quiet enough to sleep.

She needs to sleep but she has to be there. She knows they need her - he needs her. No one else can do what she can, find the links, spot the harmony in the cacophony of noise coming up from GCHQ, the cousins, their own agents and even Big Sister. Ruth has to be there to hear it, that wrong note, the one that doesn't fit and will lead the way to the bombers before it's too late, that lets them find them.

Lets her bring them to Harry.

***

 

Fiona can't get the small of petrol out of her nose. She fills their home with flowers, tries perfume after perfume she has to wash off to do her job and buys shower gel after shower gel looking for the one that will get rid of the stench of her own death.

She knows it was months ago. She knows that the clothes saturated with it are long gone, that Adam held her in the shower like he'd never let her go as a nightmare dripped down the drain. Fiona is a professional. She's got over it and through it, filled the car, walked into the Grid and written her reports on trying to stop a man committing suicide to save your husband from an obscenity. She sits meek and mild as men who'd applaud watching her burn to death on the internet, laugh as her son cried, pour petrol into baths.

Fiona does her job.

She cooks and tries to breathe in the sweet scents of home as her partner plays would-be suicide bomber. She pulls on the wardrobe of childhood and the rote learning that's never left her and wears it as armour to bring down those that would burn her and hers. She clings to Adam in the nights they snatch together, but it's a race against time.

And all the roses in Damascus can't cover the stench of petrol.

***

 

Adam can't seem to get rid of the dried blood etched into his hands. The crystals scratch under his nails and no matter how much he washes his hands between sessions, he's never free of it.

It's not surprising. He spends his time at the ground zeros, trying as hard to ignore the wounds to Marks and Spencers as he does trying not to see himself in a thousand tube trips. Then there's the hazmat suits and the protective coverings to stop him from contaminating the unclean - he shouldn't be able to feel the grit, the asbestos fibres creeping their way closer and closer to his lungs through those, let alone the blood, but he does.

He has moments when he's there - not in this room - when he's not the one standing, when he's the one in the chair. It's not Adam with the one with the power to make it stop, just the one whose power is stripped down to the power to endure.

Adam knows he's not there, that he's the one asking the questions. He washes his hands between sessions, uses the anti-bacterial soap after using the bugs that don't leave a mark on the outside until his hands dry, crack and bleed. He knows he can't stop until he's got the answers they need so badly he could scream, the answers that will stop the tearing of nails through commuters and the slime of VX from touching his son.

But he can't stop feeling it on his hands. Not when there's this room. Not when he's in on the raids - both those that cower and cringe and those that fight like cornered rats with nothing to lose and an infidel to offer to as the price of admission to paradise. None of it is pleasant, none of it is fun, but it all adds up to drying blood on his hands.

He just wishes he could be sure whose blood it is.

***

 

Tom's at home when he sees the news.

His morning coffee turns to ashes in his mouth. He gets halfway to the telephone to call in before he remembers that he's out, that he's burnt his bridges and won't be allowed back in if he tries. He's a civilian now. His job is to stay put, not be a nuisance, to try not to think of all the things everyone does with the knowledge of a thousand times worse.

He drinks the coffee cold and doesn't even notice.

Tom Quinn takes his pills at the same time every morning. They always catch his throat and they always make it burn, but they help, they help a lot. He can sleep and function and not shoot his boss or ruin an op. Sometimes he thinks that if he could take the pills and work, he could go back. He could take the bitterness, the dryness in his mouth and the occasional tingles and do it, the job. Go back to Harry, Zoe, Danny, all of them, and do what he's good at.

He's tempted to leave this half-life and make a call, see if it's possible.

Tom knows that it isn't. That once you're out, you're out and that while they take care of their own, he can't go home again. No matter how much he's needed, no matter how much he wants and fears it, the telephone won't ring.

But when he has to watch and work out what's going on from what they're not saying, it doesn't matter what he drinks the pills down with, it all tastes of nothing.


End file.
